Moreau is an android who is very skilled at invention and bioengineering. This supplement provides you with his stats, background, adventure hooks, and stats and info for one of his toughest minions. A great villain to drop into your ICONS game, or practically any superhero RPG. The art and layout are very good.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: The Moreau-1 Files is seemingly unconnected to the USHER setting, the Wargame setting or the world being laid out in the Field Guide to Superheroes, but also seems like it would be very simple to insert in a number of settings. This $1 supplement is basically two full character write-ups: The android Moreau-1, and his creation Erapato. Moreau-1, as his name implies, is all about genetic engineering, tinkering with people and animals. It is laid out in the form of stolen intelligence, setting up the menace of Moreau-1. Erapato is an interesting creation, a type of elephant man designed to be the leader of Moreau-1's new race, though he's not so much a fan of his creator's tactics. Three plot seeds are also provided for using the material within.

WHAT WORKS: Moreau-1 and Erapato both have interesting character hooks, with Moreau-1 serving both as a supervillain arms dealer and a mad scientist, and Erapato perhaps attempting betrayal of Moreau-1 could make for some fun gameplay. As noted, the characters could fit well into a variety of supers settings with little work.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK: Not much, especially for the price.

CONClUSION: Personally, I see a fair amount of potential use just out of this release (the first of three). There seemed to be a weird shift in fonts on the adventure seeds, but nothing to get too excited about. Thumbs up.

In "The Moreau-1 Files," Vigilance Press offers us a modern-day supervillain, the titular Moreau-1. He's a robotic bioengineering genius; if you read Marvel comics, think of a cross between Ultron and the High Evolutionary. Game stats, a detailed backstory, and a couple of adventure hooks make it easy for ICONS GMs to incorporate Moreau-1 into their own stories, even if not set in the Vigilance universe. The product also includes a briefer writeup on Erepato, one of Moreau-1's bio-engineered creations who could make a conflict with Moreau-1 very interesting from a role-playing point of view.

On the negative side, the product needs better proofreading, as it exhibits an uncomfortably high rate of misplaced or misused punctuation, grammatical errors, inconsistent spelling, and even missing ("a large weapons deal that bringing in") and misplaced words ("held for him ransom"). Furthermore, white text on colored backgrounds (especially the basic "paneled" background used throughout) and occasional inconsistencies in the typesetting (or errors in font embedding, perhaps) make reading difficult.